- Courtesy of LCD Soundsystem
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BY JOSHUA BAYER
Daily Arts Writer
Published May 16, 2010
James Murphy just lost about a third of his Cool Points — which is a damn shame, considering that the dance-producing one-man army behind the LCD Soundsystem moniker is so stinking cool he’s even been tagged by multiple publications as “the coolest person on the planet.” Unfortunately, This Is Happening, the third and allegedly final chapter in the LCD discography, is so uncool it’s — gasp — ironic (which is surely how Murphy intended it).
LCD Soundsystem
This Is Happening
Virgin
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More of a stylist than a songwriter, Murphy has always derived his success more from his iconically inebriated New York swagger, brass-knuckled cynicism and super-slick production than from his ability to craft a classically solid composition. His razor-sharp dance-funk odysseys usually grind well past the five-minute mark, coasting on tight, angular grooves and an anomalously offhand lyrical style that falls somewhere between drunken refrigerator magnet poetry and caustic social satire.
But Murphy’s most precious quality has always been his ability to maintain a big, gushy heart underneath all that flashy irony — lending his music a tender, hungover romanticism.
The issue with Happening is that it’s neither hip nor romantic. In fact, more than anything else, it’s just plain lazy.
Case in point: lead single “Drunk Girls.” While the track’s tubthumping bass-and-tom underbelly, scratchy rhythm guitar-riffing and spitfire lyrics (“Drunk girls know that love is an astronaut / It comes back but it’s never the same”) make for an initially invigorating listen, it’s hard to ignore that the song is little more than a dumbed-down rehash of Sound of Silver’s far superior “North American Scum,” minus all the loud-quiet-loud dynamism and biting subtlety. Murphy stomps out the gates like an alcoholic Godzilla, confusing insistence for immediacy and stopping only to deliver a half-assed guitar solo ripped straight out of Yo La Tengo’s playbook.
Happening also suffers from a severe lack of editing. While most of the songs have their moments, it’s hard to pick out even a single standout because literally every track is teeming with baby fat.
“One Touch,” for all its glow-in-the-dark, subterranean rave-up seduction, sags under its unwieldy verse-chorus-verse-chorus-chorus-verse-chorus-chorus structure. The song dry humps on and on, revealing all its tricks (deliciously croupy-sounding guitar screeching, synths tubular enough to ride, Saturday-morning-cartoon bell chimes) in the first three minutes and then re-treading them for another four.
The record’s aberrant lack of concision — Happening clocks in at a bloated 65 minutes — makes it an incredibly tedious front-to-back listen.
But the most frustrating aspect of Happening is its overpowering nerd-kitsch vibe. It’s as if Murphy, always the King of Irony, got a little bit self-conscious about being too predictably cool and felt obliged to splatter the album with cheap-sounding Poindexter flourishes.
“All I Want,” the closest the record gets to the emotional weight of LCD's 2007 masterwork Sound of Silver, starts out as a refreshingly bittersweet breath of blue-eyed, piano-driven power pop. But less than halfway through the track, an aimless, cheesy synth “melody" — sounding like an overzealous 12-year-old that suddenly got hold of a junky keyboard — kicks in at the very top of the mix, refusing to pipe down for the remainder of the song and drowning out any sustained sense of nostalgia.
And when “You Wanted A Hit” — the album’s stripped-down, sinewy centerpiece — finally rides its tense-as-hell riffing to the ejaculatory boiling point, Murphy bizarrely decides to gob over his white-hot guitar shredding with a geeky flurry of random-sounding gizmo noises.
Happening is like a joke album that thinks it can transcend its novelty status by being incredibly self-aware.
